All Chapters of Two Can Play: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

JULIAN I could not believe my eyes.Standing on that stage, under those lights, was my wife. My Celeste. Dressed like she was going to a whore's ball instead of a charity gala. That red dress barely covered her breasts. The slit went all the way up to her thigh. Every man in that room was looking at her. I saw their eyes. I saw the way they devoured her with their gazes.And she was smiling. She was lapping it up.I tried to get to her. I pushed through the crowd, but those bodyguards blocked my path like I was nobody. Like I was just another face in the crowd. I was her husband. I had every right to be on that stage with her.But she was gone before I could reach her. Disappeared like smoke.I searched everywhere. I called her phone. Straight to voicemail. I sent messages. Where are you? Are you okay? Please call me. Nothing. I paid the hotel staff to look for her. I checked the security footage myself. The cameras showed her walking on stage. After that, nothing. Like she had vanis

CELESTE I walked through the front door and the smell hit me before anything else. Sex. Sweat. The kind of thick, used air that comes from bodies that have been tangled together. I knew that smell. I had come home to it many times before, back when I was still stupid enough to trust Julian. I looked at Seraphine sitting on my sofa, and I looked at Julian standing near the kitchen doorway with that fake concern on his face, and I knew exactly what they had been doing while I was gone. The thought should have burned. It didn't. It just sat there in my chest, cold and still, like a stone I had swallowed a long time ago and finally stopped choking on. Hearing Julian talk about fidelity, I resisted the urge to slap him. Just entering the house, taking one look at Sera with her smeared lipstick and the smell of sex all over this room, I knew they had just finished. Probably right on my couch. Maybe against the wall. Maybe in my bed. It didn't matter anymore. Nothing they did could

DOMINIC I drove back to the hotel, lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. The room was quiet. The city outside was quiet. There was no reason for me to still be awake. I was still awake. She kept coming back. Not in the way that annoyed me, not the way a problem returns when you have not solved it. She came back the way a song does, the way a smell does, without warning and without permission and with a completeness that made everything else feel slightly less real. The office. The table. The way she had looked at me afterward, still catching her breath, her eyes asking a question she had not put into words yet. The car. I laughed quietly at the ceiling. That woman was going to be the end of me. But it was not only that. It was not even mostly that. It was the way she had talked to me in the closet when I told her about my parents, the way she had not filled the silence with sympathy I did not ask for. It was the way she had fed me dinner with a straight face and pr

SERAPHINE I left that house seething. My jaw was tight the entire drive home, my hands gripping the wheel harder than necessary, replaying every single moment of that evening on a loop that would not stop. Both of them had put their hands on me. Julian, who I had knelt in front of. Who I had swallowed for. Who I had let use my body against a wall in his own living room while his wife was God knows where doing God knows what. That same Julian had slapped me hard enough to knock me to the floor, and for what? For Celeste? And Celeste. I balled my fist against the wheel. The Celeste I had known for over a decade would never have raised her hand to me. If I had slapped her, and I admitted to myself that perhaps I should not have done it the moment she walked through the door, she would have asked me why. She would have listened. She would have apologized for whatever she thought she had done to upset me and then she would have offered me tea. That was the Celeste I knew. The wom

CELESTE I was up before the sun. I freshened up, got dressed, and called Pat. "I will be late this morning," I told her. "Everything okay?" she asked. "Everything is fine. I just have something to handle at home first." She did not push. Pat never pushed. One of the many reasons I loved her. I sat on the edge of the guest bed in my green dress and white heels, and looked at the time. Julian had not come home last night. I noticed when I first came out of my room. Good for him, I thought. Truly. Wherever he was, I hoped he was comfortable. My phone buzzed. It was a call from Dominic. I answered before the second ring. "Good morning," I said. "Good morning, beautiful." His voice was low and rough, like he had just woken up. "Are you ready for your gift?" "I have been ready since you mentioned it," I told him. He laughed softly. "The handyman will be there in less than five minutes, dressed in black jeans, black face cap, full beard, and a black t-shirt.